During the BAFTA Game Awards 2014, IGN had a chance to speak to game director Ashraf Ismail, who explained by Assassin’s Creed 5 won’t have naval battles:

“With Assassin’s Creed we always say that history is our playground. When we chose the pirate setting, obviously it meant naval battles had to be a core element of the game. The questions are always about what time periods we go into, but that’s a decision based on whether these time periods are interesting for fans, interesting for us as developers, and what it’d mean for the game mechanics. We don’t bind ourselves to game mechanics. We don’t bind ourselves to game mechanics, but we really look at what is interesting historically speaking, and what game mechanics that naturally brings up…. So I don’t want to talk about what’s the future for naval and all this, but I love that people loved it in Black Flag. It was a risk for us to make it part of the core of an Assassin’s game, but people really took to it and loved it, which is really gratifying for us. As I said though, whatever period in time we choose? That’s what dictates the kind of mechanics we put in the game, not the other way around.”

For anyone following the Assassin’s Creed 5 rumors this statement should be too surprising. AC 4: Black Flag lead writer Darby McDevitt once said the AC 5 location hints were all lies intended as fan service, but at the same time he also revealed that the gameplay code written for naval combat would come back in a new form:

“There’s often ways to creatively use old technology for new things. One of the things that made ACIII‘s naval combat possible—and then of course ACIV—is that we were able to have characters climb and walk around on dynamically moving objects. With ACIII we started working on that technology and it fed into the naval combat because the boats are constantly moving as opposed to being fixed to the ground, so all of this technology, it might appear in future games—it might just not be on boats. It might appear in a completely different way.”